The research on damage detection in wind turbine blades plays an important role in reducing the risk of shut down in wind turbines. Rapid and accurate damage identification by using efficient detection models is the focus of the current research on damage detection in wind turbine blades. To solve the problems of the complex structure of the model and high time consumption in deep learning models, an improved broad learning system (BLS) model using the algorithm of chunking based on non-local means (NLMs) was proposed, which was called the CBNLM-BLS. The chunked, in-parallel accelerated integral image approach was used to optimize the NLM to speed up the BLS. Experiment results showed that the proposed model achieved a classification accuracy of 99.716%, taking 28.662 s to detect damage in the wind turbine blades. Compared with deep neural network models, such as ResNet, AlexNet and VGG-19, the proposed CBNLM-BLS had higher classification accuracy, shorter training time and less complex model construction and parameters. Compared with traditional BLSs, the CBNLM-BLS had less time complexity. It is of great significance to identify damage in wind turbine blades more efficiently.